Brexit demands leadership, not just management

Meanwhile, there has been talk – it's not treated terribly seriously by pundits – of a possible general election if Parliament does not ratify the Government's final EU strategy.

Given the relative weakness of Her Majesty's Opposition and the fact that the Labour leader basically sided with the "leave" campaign by default anyway, this seems very unlikely.

However, any serious stalemates within Parliament over negotiating positions might at least inspire Europhiles of all Parties to take advantage of public confusion and campaign for a second referendum.

A second vote would be in nobody's best interests, least of all those of the British voters, the majority of whom would hopefully see it as a giant exercise in political expediency and hypocrisy.

It is disingenuous to say, as some anti-Brexiteers are saying now, that we should not have had an EU referendum in the first place – because we are not governed by plebiscite but by elected MPs – and then to demand a second referendum.

When Britons voted to leave the EU, they were not expressing an opinion but issuing an instruction to Parliament. The Parliament decided to grant the citizenry the right to make the decision on our ongoing EU membership.

By voting one way or the other, Brits were not merely expressing a preference, they were presenting an order to their elected representatives. MPs are chared with acting on that instruction, whatever their personal views. They are, after all, servants of the people – or they're meant to be.

Theresa May and her government will need to navigate the choppy waters inside Parliament with skill and courage. They may even, in one respect, need to take a leaf from the playbook of one D.J. Trump. They might do well, at times, to take a two tiered approach to the domestic debate; drip-feeding then defending their basic intentions directly to the public, while simultaneously presenting the detail before Parliament.

This may not seem the British way and I gather very few people here would want to see Mrs May become a Twitterphile in the ilk of the new US President. Yet the public must be brought along on the journey and the Government must use all the technology at its command, including old and new media, to keep lines of communication open, to persuade rather than cojole.

We the people (as they like to say across the pond) do not need to have a say on every detail – that's what MPs are paid to do. We do, however, need to have a sense of collective ownership of a process that will, after all, impact our children and grandchildren more than ourselves, hopefully (but not inevitably) for the better.

The other thing our leaders must do in the lead-up to Brexit, is to avoid any expressions of elitism.

The Brexit vote was a product of a number of factors, some social, others economic and even emotional. One of those was an anti-establishment feeling; a sense that the governing classes were ignoring the needs of the people who had elected them.